A striking contemporary home on the water | Steeltec37

January 12, 2013

This eye-catching small house floats on a lake in the Lusatian lake district of Saxony in Germany. Its unique curved roof resembles a sail under wind, fitting imagery for a floating home. It is one of two floating homes available for vacation rentals at the Lausitz Resort.

The house was constructed largely of steel by Steeltec37, with a steel structure and steel exterior finishes. Floating homes are often flooded with light due to the reflection of sunlight off the water and the lack of any vegetation near enough to offer shade. Steeltec37’s solution was to install sliding slatted screens (made of steel of course) for light control.

The compact home has 97 m² (1,044 ft²) of living space on two levels topped by an open roof deck. The division of spaces over the two levels is a bit unusual: the dining room, kitchen and bathroom are on the lower level while the living room and sleeping quarters share the upper deck.

The dining room is quite roomy while the kitchen is fairly compact. Due to the curvature of the back wall, no upper cabinets were installed. All the storage is under the counters, an arrangement that might become irritating in a house designed for full-time living. However, this is a vacation rental so it’s likely not a big deal. The bathroom is very spacious and offers both a shower and bathtub. In fact the bathroom is even larger than the kitchen. As you can see in the photo above, the bathroom wall consists of a sheet of glass. For those concerned about privacy, it is a type of “smart glass” that becomes opaque at the flick of a switch.

Stairs lead up from the dining room to the living room above. The sleeping areas are tucked back under the curved wall where there is a little bit of reduced headroom. There is one enclosed bedroom while the other sleeping area is open to the living room, but the floor plan would allow it to be easily enclosed as well. Both have dramatically curved ceilings vaulting up to clerestory windows.

One thing to keep in mind when designing a home is to avoid having circulation paths that cut diagonally across a room. It makes furniture placement difficult; either you have people tripping over furniture as they try to navigate through the room, or you lose a lot of usable space by pulling the furniture into a tight grouping so that people can walk around the outside. Unfortunately in this home the living room has the bedroom door diagonally opposite the stairs leading to the downstairs bathroom. You can see in the photos that the owners have angled the couch to create a more direct nighttime travel path, but it does take quite a bit of space from the living area. It would have been better to have the stairs run the other way so that they entered the living room on the same side as the bedroom doors. Then on the lower level there would still be a direct path to the bathroom cutting across the end of the dining room, where circulation space is needed around the table anyway.

If floating homes are your thing, we previously had a look at the Silberfisch, a modern floating home by Confused-Direction.